Massachusetts prosecutors run on dial-up-era software — Nasser's Blog

Coming soon: The Massachusetts Prosecutor Data Project !<br>More than six million criminal charges from ten of the state's eleven District Attorneys, requested under the public records law, are being made comparable for the first time.

Sign up at prosecutordata.org. What follows is the case for why the project needs to exist.

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Massachusetts has decided to lead the country on artificial intelligence. Over the past two years, the state has put a hundred million dollars into a new AI Hub, placed a ChatGPT assistant on the desks of forty thousand state employees, and directed every agency to work out what the technology can do for the public's business. The public is warier than its government: two thirds of Massachusetts voters tell pollsters they are more concerned than excited about artificial intelligence.[1]

Massachusetts has not extended its technology modernization to the offices with the most direct power over ordinary life in the Commonwealth: the eleven District Attorneys. The state elects one for each county or small group of counties, and each runs an independent office that answers, between elections, to no governor, no mayor, and no oversight board.[2] Their Assistant District Attorneys (ADAs) decide every day who gets charged with a crime, who gets offered a way out of one, and who gets left alone.

All eleven District Attorneys' offices run on a shared database called DAMION, which holds the record of essentially every criminal case in the state and is roughly twenty-five years old.[3] Even the offices that use it every day do not defend its age. The Massachusetts District Attorneys Association (MDAA), the nonprofit through which the eleven offices share funding and technology, describes DAMION in its request for proposals for a replacement as "implemented approximately 25 years ago" and "nearing its end of life." The State Auditor went further this past November, reporting that the case management system used by all eleven offices "is obsolete and… may soon no longer be supported by the software manufacturer."[4] When DAMION came online in the early 2000s, most Americans with internet at home still connected through a screeching dial-up modem, and the iPhone was still years away.[5] AOL shut down its dial-up service last fall, by which point about one American household in a thousand still used it. DAMION remains in daily use by every District Attorney in Massachusetts.

In July 2026 the MassINC Polling Group surveyed 1,264 registered Massachusetts voters, with the survey in the field from June 23 to July 1 and a margin of error of 3.7 points. Sixty-five percent of those voters said they are more concerned than excited about artificial intelligence, and seventy-five percent said they supported the frontier-AI safety legislation then pending before the Legislature. One disclosure worth making plainly: the poll was paid for by Anthropic, which is itself an AI company. The poll and its full crosstabs are on MassINC Polling Group's site. ↩︎

Unless the elected District Attorney chooses to create one. Suffolk County briefly had a Discharge Integrity Team, created in 2019 to review fatal police encounters; its creator left office without releasing its reports, and the backlog passed to her successor. A body like that exists at the elected's pleasure and dissolves the same way. ↩︎

DAMION is the offices' loose acronym for the District Attorney Management Information Office Network. The system's current vendor is Tyler Technologies, and the offices maintain it through their shared nonprofit, the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association. ↩︎

The State Auditor released the audit of the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association on November 17, 2025. ↩︎

DAMION's exact launch date is not public; the request for proposals to replace it describes the system as approximately twenty-five years old, which places its start in the early 2000s. The Pew Research Center tracked how dial-up remained the way most American home internet users connected until the mid-2000s, when broadband finally overtook it; dial-up use peaked at about forty-one percent of adults in 2001. The Census Bureau's 2024 American Community Survey counts 127,668 households that still connect by dial-up alone, about one household in a thousand. AOL turned its dial-up service off for good on September 30, 2025. ↩︎

Screenshot of the case management system used by the Massachusetts District Attorneys. From the Audit of the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association (November 17, 2025)What a prosecutor decides, and who can check it

Once someone is arrested in Massachusetts, no one has more power over what happens to them than the prosecutor. If you are ever arrested in Massachusetts, for shoplifting or for driving on a suspended license, the officer who arrests you can recommend charges but does not decide them; an ADA does.[1] The ADA decides whether you...